Sequoia Capital – Gigaomhttps://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 25 Sep 2017 15:05:19 +0000en-UShourly1Is Jajah dead? Well, depends on who and what you askhttps://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/is-jajah-dead-well-depends-on-who-and-what-you-ask/
https://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/is-jajah-dead-well-depends-on-who-and-what-you-ask/#commentsTue, 03 Dec 2013 05:23:48 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=720621In 2009, Telefonica, the Spanish telecom giant which owns networks across the world, announced that it was going to acquire Jajah, an early internet voice service provider, for $207 million. The news was greeted with much applause, not only because of the exit valuation, but also because it showed that old telecoms were responding to the challenge posed by the likes of Skype. Over-the-top services were going to become the norm, and it was good to see a telco that provided both wireless and wired services embrace the future.

And then we all promptly forgot about the company. Fast forward to this weekend, and all hell broke loose:

As of January 31, 2014, Jajah will no longer offer any Jajah.com or Jajah Direct services to its users in the United States or elsewhere. This means that, as of January 31, 2014, you will no longer be able to make any calls through any of Jajah’s services, including the Jajah.com website and Jajah Direct. Registration of new accounts are no longer being accepted.

The planned shut down of Jajah by Telefonica also follows the shuttering earlier this year of mobile VoIP play Tu Me and is evidence of the internal fighting at Telefonica as the TuGo product is surviving (for now). … (It shows) how non-innovative Telefonica really was, as acquisitions are not innovation and (I) referred to Jajah as “two servers in a broom closet connected to a few Tier One networks” at their time of acquisition. It looks like I wasn’t that far off as shutting down a $200 million dollar purchase rivals the BT purchase of Ribbit for over $100 million dollars, which BT has basically wound down after buying the company for what was to be six services BT had on their roadmap, but never executed on either. These two failures demonstrate the difference between Google, Microsoft and Apple who buy strategically, while old line telcos buy out of fear and uncertainty.

Abramson makes absolutely fair points. Telecoms are buyers of the last resort and they are buying way too late. I wrote about Jajah quite a bit and was always underwhelmed by them. They were so much in awe of Skype and their strategy was shaped by what others did — one of the reasons why they felt less of a leader. So perhaps, when they got bought, it was actually a pleasant ending to the company.

The shutdown of the service brought back memories and I made some calls to people who are (and were) intimately involved with the company. As might be expected, they painted a much less bleak picture. The fact is that Telefonica has killed Jajah, the consumer facing service, but rest of the business — and the real reason why Spanish telecom giant bought them — is still in business. Telefonica wanted to get a platform to launch over-the-top applications for its service, and Jajah gave it that platform. Some of its apps in U.K., for example, use the same platform.

Similarly, most of Jajah’s team (minus the management) is still in place, working for Telefonica and working on the platform. Telefonica wanted to get a presence in Silicon Valley and Jajah’s Mountain View offices gave Telefonica leg room to establish itself in Silicon Valley. They have local executives who work with app companies on partnerships and also make investments in startups. So, from that perspective, Telefonica got what it paid for when it bought Jajah.

Jajah the consumer service, however, has been put to rest. It never really was a big enough business and Telefonica just let it lie fallow for years. We are told they had less than 5 million customers for its consumer service — a pittance compared to hundreds of millions of people Telefonica counts as customers. It would make perfect sense for them to kill it. It would also make perfect sense for the phone company to get its act together and communicate the strategy behind this decision more clearly, but I bet someone forgot to read a memo sent to them by someone else.

PS: My view (and I have been saying it all along) is that all carriers need to stop mucking about with applications and focus clearly on back-end infrastructure, billing and networks. Let people invent the apps that would lead to more network usage, which in turn would allow them to sell faster pipes — and make more money.

That’s my 2 cents, but then again, no one really listens to me.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/is-jajah-dead-well-depends-on-who-and-what-you-ask/feed/5Sequoia not shy about investing in energy, transportation startupshttps://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/sequoia-not-shy-about-investing-in-energy-transportation-startups/
https://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/sequoia-not-shy-about-investing-in-energy-transportation-startups/#commentsTue, 15 Oct 2013 19:27:00 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=704958Just don’t call it cleantech — that term has morphed into a dirty word for venture capitalists and the limited partners that put money into VC funds. But Valley leader Sequoia Capital has quietly been investing in a decent number of energy, transportation and resource-focused startups that were once considered part of the cleantech sector throughout 2013.

Over the last few years Sequoia has actually had one of the better batting averages in cleantech, despite the fact that the firm has done a much more modest amount of investments compared to more aggressive firms like Kleiner Perkins, NEA, and Khosla Ventures. Sequoia has backed battery company A123 Systems (which went public in 2009), as well as eMeter, an energy software startup that was acquired by Siemens in late 2011.

While Sequoia may be the rare breed of venture fund that has slowly and steadily been picking and choosing some of the standout bets in energy and transportation, startups are now increasingly looking to corporate investors for more funding. Silicon solar wafer startup 1366 Technologies just closed a $15 million round from Japanese silicon giant Tokuyama Corp. and energy data startup EcoFactor recently raised funding from new power industry investor NRG Energy.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/sequoia-not-shy-about-investing-in-energy-transportation-startups/feed/4ThousandEyes sniffs out performance problems on-site, off-site whereverhttps://gigaom.com/2013/06/19/thousandeyes-sniffs-out-performance-problems-on-site-off-site-wherever/
https://gigaom.com/2013/06/19/thousandeyes-sniffs-out-performance-problems-on-site-off-site-wherever/#commentsWed, 19 Jun 2013 11:30:26 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=657847As companies divvy up more workloads between in-house IT systems and off-site Software-as-a-Service providers, it’s gotten much harder to pinpoint the source of a problem when an application hangs. Is it a local router? A bad VM? An internet issue or problem at your favorite SaaS provider?

Traditional performance monitoring tools may be fine for keeping tabs on what’s happening in house, but not so great at what’s happening outside. At least that’s the thinking behind ThousandEyes, a San Francisco startup emerging from stealth Wednesday at GigaOM Structure. Built from the ground up to attack this distributed performance monitoring problem, he claimed ThousandEyes does a better job than older tools. In that camp, it competes with offerings from IBM/Tivoli(s ibm), CA (s ca), HP (s hpq), and NetScout and also with dev favorite New Relic.

ThousandEyes’ says it can look at all your internal application stacks but the rest of infrastructure and also push beyond all that to check out the internet path between your site and your SaaS providers and even look into their stacks to see if the problem originates there, ThousandEyes co-founder and CEO Mohit Lad said in a recent interview. Of course that means ThousandEyes has to sell into two constituencies, the end-user company and the major SaaS providers.

The company is already doing that, Ladsaid. Several of the top SaaS providers, including “a very large” but unnamed CRM vendor are aboard, he said. Other customers include Evernote, Priceline, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk and Zynga plus some Fortune 500 companies. ThousandEyes also just garnered $5.5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors to keep building out its service.

There are two delivery models. Public agents for use by cloud providers, banks and other online sites to monitor their own infrastructure are priced per test run. Private agents, for use by enterprises in their branch offices, cost a flat fee per month and can run as many tests as capacity allows.

To foster cooperation rather than finger pointing between internal IT staff and SaaS vendors, ThousandEyes also makes it easy for an admin to take a snapshot of what he or she is seeing on the console and share that with the vendor personnel via a shared URL. A Twitter-like message thread also lets different teams keep track of who’s doing what about the issue.

Mohit and his co-founder and CTO Ricardo Oliveira were both Ph.D’s in computer science at UCLA.

It seems clear that companies will keep using more off-site SaaS services along with their own internal applications so tools that can troubleshoot both sets of IT should be attractive going forward.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2013/06/19/thousandeyes-sniffs-out-performance-problems-on-site-off-site-wherever/feed/1MadeiraCloud nets $1.5M to paint a pretty picture of your Amazon cloudhttps://gigaom.com/2013/05/09/madeiracloud-nets-1-5m-to-watch-your-amazon-cloud/
https://gigaom.com/2013/05/09/madeiracloud-nets-1-5m-to-watch-your-amazon-cloud/#commentsThu, 09 May 2013 15:00:33 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=643691MadeiraCloud, a startup in the crowded field of Amazon(s amzn) Web Services monitoring and management services, snagged $1.5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital.

The company provides a graphical visualization of the architecture and resources used by a given application, not just a spreadsheet-like list of all the AWS instances on one page and all the databases on another, said CEO Daniel O’Prey via email. MadeiraCloud got its start in Beijing and now has an office in San Francisco.

That funding comes atop about $160,000 in seed funding, and will be used to beef up the development team and to market the product. The 11-person shop has done no marketing to date.

There are a raft of companies that provide AWS monitoring and management capabilities, but O’Prey said Madeira’s simple, self-service interface probably competes most directly with the AWS Console itself. Longer term, he sees MadeiraCloud taking on companies like RightScale and Enstratrius, just acquired by Dell (s dell).

Those are some pretty big rivals to contend with but the company most of these contenders have to watch is Amazon itself, which is rolling out more and more of its own management and monitoring tools, including OpsWorks.

We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so’s money is Sequoia’s money, that would not be a good thing.

This is complete warfare. You have to have the Green Berets in the back line, you have to take the frontal approach, you have to do seeds, you have to do investments. You have to be willing to risk things, otherwise somebody else will put you out of business.

[Instagram] sold completely prematurely. A billion dollars sounded great to the founders. Imagine what Instagram could be. It could be the next Facebook on the mobile phone.”

]]>Okta gets $25M more to take on cloud identity managementhttps://gigaom.com/2012/12/04/otka-gets-25m-more-to-take-on-cloud-identity-management/
https://gigaom.com/2012/12/04/otka-gets-25m-more-to-take-on-cloud-identity-management/#commentsTue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:08 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=590506Okta, an almost-four-year-old startup pushing a new type of identity management aimed at cloud-based enterprise applications, has raised $25 million in third-round funding. This round brings the San Francisco-based company to $52 million in total funding. New investor Sequoia Capital led the round with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate also participating.

Okta is part of the cohort of companies that have seen the shift to the cloud as an opportunity to rethink the way legacy enterprise software is built. Other players include Boundary, Aryaka and Workday. Each of these firms has seen the way that cloud computing and software as a service can disrupt the enterprise IT market and have made bold bets building out new services that take advantage of the decentralized nature of the cloud, cheaper compute or new business models. The real question as the startups gain customers and credibility is which of the IT giants will buy them and for how much of a premium?

Okta, for example, offers a centralized identity management platform that competes with services such as Microsoft’s (s msft) Active Directory and Oracle’s (s orcl) Identity Management suite. Okta’s software works to establish user identity on both cloud applications but also for legacy and on-premise programs. This saves Okta’s customers from having to use two different identity management products for employees. Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta told me in an interview ahead of the announcement that it has seen a lot of success recently stealing customers from the established vendors, and that the funding will help it continue to invest in connecting its platform to older, legacy applications that its customers want integrated into the Okta software.

Otka says it has added more than 140 enterprise customers and 300,000 users to its service in 2012, including Allergan, BMC(s bmc) Software, Clorox, Groupon(s grpn) and National Geographic. Okta has developed relationships with more than 2,000 cloud applications, all of which come pre-integrated in the Okta Application Network, and counts leading enterprise SaaS companies such as Jive(s jive), Lithium and SuccessFactors(s sap) as customers.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2012/12/04/otka-gets-25m-more-to-take-on-cloud-identity-management/feed/4Embattled video startup Color says it won’t fade to black (for now)https://gigaom.com/2012/10/17/embattled-video-startup-color-says-it-wont-fade-to-black-for-now/
Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:00:08 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=574766UPDATED: Video-sharing startup Color has been a popular punching bag after reports said CEO and co-founder Bill Nguyen was on sabbatical and workers were moving on. So when a report surfaced Wednesday saying the video-sharing company was “winding down” its business, it fueled fresh schadenfreude for the brash startup that came out of the gate last year with $41 million in funding.

But the company isn’t dead yet, said a spokesperson. “Color is not shutting down,” the spokesperson told me.

UPDATE II: The Next Web, quoting trusted sources, reported that Apple (s aapl) is about to buy Color for a price in the high double digits. Apple bought Nguyen’s previous startup Lala for $80 million and Apple SVP of internet services and software Eddy Cue knows Nguyen. (Original story continues below)

The report of Color’s closure was first reported by Venturebeat, which cited a company email sent to employees. In it, the company apparently announced to employees that “last week, the Board and major shareholders voted to wind down the company.” But we’ve heard from a couple of people who said that employees there have not received the email. The company is now trying to investigate where the email information may have come from.

UPDATE I: Venturebeat said the email was sent by Color’s vice president of finance Andrew Urushima and that it can’t confirm that more than one employee received it.

Make no mistake, Color is going through a lot of upheavals. Nguyen hasn’t been with the company for about three months, though he continues to retain the title CEO. The size of the staff has fallen from about 50 people earlier in the spring to a staff somewhere in the 30s now. And morale took a hit after Nguyen stepped back from day to day duties, sources have told me.

But the company has a deal with Verizon signed in May (s vz) to embed its mobile video sharing app on certain Android devices. I’m told that the deal is still in place and Color is working on new product plans. It’s still possible, of course, that Color or its backers could call it quits all the same. But a lack of money probably isn’t the issue. Nguyen said earlier this year that Color had enough money for five or six years.

That’s as a result of Color’s huge $41 million funding last year from Sequoia, which was trumpeted at the same time it launched what was originally a photo sharing app. The app’s failure to catch on with consumers and the cocky promotion-style of Nguyen made Color the startup everyone loved to hate. But does it mean Color is doomed? It might be ultimately if no one can make Color’s pivot toward live video sharing work. And now with more founders stepping back, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But it sounds like people will have to wait a little more before they break out their favorite Color jokes.

]]>iPad publisher Inkling expands to iPhonehttps://gigaom.com/2012/07/31/ipad-publisher-inkling-expands-to-iphone/
Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:00:40 +0000http://paidcontent.org/?p=215544iPad (s AAPL) publisher Inkling is bringing its textbooks and cookbooks to the iPhone. (The company’s Frommer’s travel guides are already available for iPhone.) The books sync across devices and users can download one chapter at a time so they don’t take up too much space on their phones.

Inkling is based in San Francisco and backed by Sequoia Capital as well as major textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

]]>Songkick’s Tourbox is a one-stop shop for live bandshttps://gigaom.com/2012/05/30/songkicks-tourbox-is-a-one-stop-shop-for-live-bands/
https://gigaom.com/2012/05/30/songkicks-tourbox-is-a-one-stop-shop-for-live-bands/#commentsWed, 30 May 2012 15:18:41 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=526917Although it’s best known as a gig listing website, Songkick has long been planning to become a broader music destination. And it finally looks like it’s starting that expansion with the launch of a new feature called Tourbox, aimed at helping musicians manage their concert promotion right across the web.

The London-based site’s latest addition is a dashboard that allows bands and artists to promote their live dates across the internet with a single process, through a series of partnerships with other services like YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud. Through a string of integrations with other music sites (Bandcamp, Foursquare and VEVO are also on the list), the site can push viewers, listeners, or readers towards their gigs and try to sell more tickets.

The service is already being used by a series of notable groups, after a beta period with prominent U.S. booking service The Windish Agency, which looks after dates for the likes of Universal Music and Domino records and artists including M83 and Soundgarden.

CEO Ian Hogarth, who recently raised $10 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, previously told me that he wants Songkick to be the “public company for live music fans”. Looks like this is one of the steps along the way.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2012/05/30/songkicks-tourbox-is-a-one-stop-shop-for-live-bands/feed/1Sunrun raises $60M for residential solar servicehttps://gigaom.com/2012/05/23/sunrun-raises-60m-for-residential-solar-service/
Wed, 23 May 2012 16:29:38 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=524874Investors may not be so keen to put money into solar manufacturing these days, but they are pumping quite a bit of money into solar financing and installation. San Francisco-based Sunrun is benefitting from this investor sentiment and announced on Wednesday that it’s raised $60 million in equity funding.

The company provides leases or power purchase agreements to consumers who pay a monthly fee for the electricity from the solar panels installed on their rooftops. This way, the home owner doesn’t have to pay the expensive, upfront cost of the equipment and installation but still gets to use a cleaner source of power. Lease or power purchase agreements are long-term contracts – 20 years for those from Sunrun – that sometimes guarantee consumers lower electric rates than what they have been paying their utilities. This model has become popular in states such as California and Massachusetts.

Sunrun is part of a group of startups that set up shop about half a dozen years ago to tackle the emerging solar retail service market. Sunrun provides the financing and owns and maintains the solar equipment, and it’s built a network of contractors that do the installation work and help market Sunrun’s financial services. The company said it has has more than 20,000 customers in 10 states since its inception in 2007.

Since then, the solar retail service market has grown tremendously, and competition also has intensified. The company has run bill board ads and launched a new marketing campaign recently. Other solar service companies have used the same types of advertising as Sunrun. Some team up with nonprofits to market their services. Sungevity, for example, announced Wednesday it’s working with the Sierra Club, and customers who go to a Sierra Club website to sign up for Sungevity’s service will get a $750 cash gift card. Sungevity also will then donate another $750 to the Sierra Club.

Some of Sunrun’s venture-backed competitors include SolarCity, Sungevity and Clean Power Finance. SolarCity plans to do an initial public offering, and Sunrun, which recently hired a chief financial officer, could also be heading in that direction, too.

Overall, Sunrun has raised $145 million in venture capital. The latest round came from investors including Madrone Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital.